So….I was flipping the channels on TV, when A & E had a special on the Bible Code: Count Down to Armegedon. Now some of you mayhaps saw this special, heard that the coming of man's end of days started with the fall of the twin towers, now I live in NY…my old school was 40 blocks from there…and I personally don't support the war, do you really believe an astroide will destory earth in 2012 as the bible code supposedly states? Fear of a nuclear holocaust. We are here to open this topic of talk and hear personal opinions. No spamming or flamming others in this thread, I want this to be a topic of talk.

For those who have yet to know of the bible code or what its all about here is some info:

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, which suggests that these codes offer warnings for the future.

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS - the word SAFEST. (The skip is -4. Spaces and punctuation are ignored.)

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5ÃƒÂ¢??10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines.

Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (GenesisÃƒÂ¢??Deuteronomy).

HistoryAn early seeker of hidden messages in the Bible was Isaac Newton, who believed that the Bible “is a cryptogram set by the Almighty - a riddle of the Godhead of past and future events divinely fore-ordained. This prophecy is called the Revelation, with respect to the Scripture of Truth, which Daniel was commanded to shut up and seal, till the time of the end. Until that time comes, the Lamb is opening the seals.”

But as far as is known, the 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher was the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. His 4-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Jewish calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, and several others.

Rips and Witztum invented the ELS letter array and used a computer to find many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test and the “Great rabbis experiment” was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELSs for the names of famous rabbis could be found closer to ELSs of their dates of birth and death than chance alone could explain. The definition of “close” was complex but, roughly, two ELSs are close if they can be displayed together in a small rectangle. The experiment succeeded in finding sequences which fit these definitions, and they were interpreted as indicating the phenomenon was real.

The great rabbis experiment went through several iterations but was eventually published (1994) in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Although neither the Editor nor the referees were convinced by it, nor could they find much formally wrong with it, so the paper was published as a “challenging puzzle”. Statistical Science, it should be noted, does not publish original research, but concentrates on surveys, interviews and interesting statistical puzzles.

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of the United States National Security Agency . Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result. These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries.

In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called The Bible Code II. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs the Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Bible and to encourage them to trust in its traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS. By 2000, most books, and most web sites, devoted to the codes were produced by Christians.

PredictionsDrosnin's most famous success was to predict, in 1994, the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, using a Bible code technique. Drosnin uses this prediction as evidence for the validity of bible code techniques. Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting with no additional details the fact that Rabin would be assassinated is not compelling, though dramatic.

Drosnin, in The Bible Code II, suggested the possibility of nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006, saying that “The dangers will peak in the Hebrew year 5766 (2006 in the modern calendar), the year that is most clearly encoded with both ‘World War’ and ‘Atomic Holocaust’.” These events did not occur, casting serious doubt on the whole paradigm.

Drosnin, however, refrains from making concrete predictions, saying, “I don't think the code makes predictions. I think it reveals probabilities.” Drosnin also said that “I think it might tell us all our possible futures. that appears to include a warning of a possible nuclear war.”

CriticismThe primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that information theory does not prohibit noise from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words are completely expected to appear.

Drosnin has been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future . Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community , mistranslating Hebrew words to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes .

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby Dick could not yield ELS, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay found many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive (“Oslo”, relating to the Oslo accords). Drosnin has responded to these claims, saying that Moby Dick code results are simply “nonsense'; he said codes found in the Bible Code were ”truth" and contained real predictions..

Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, the known coded references in Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, …) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text.

Code proponents respond by claiming that the ELS letter arrays appearing in the Bible are better in some way than those appearing in other books. They also investigate alternative types of codes and cyphers to stay ahead of criticism. However, in the absence of an objective measure of quality, and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

In 1999, McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science which they claim provides an adequate refutation of the earlier paper of Witztum and Rips. The paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians who found their refutation completely conclusive.

Their main points were:

The data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew. The Hebrew language is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so special care should be taken as to how to choose the particular names searched for. So their result could be explained by claiming the data was not collected properly. From the paper: "…the data was very far from tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous “wiggle room” available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis“. There is indirect evidence that the data was not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased towards those supporting the codes hypothesis. Attempts at replicating the experiment, while being similar in the large, failed to achieve the exactly same results to the last digit. From the paper: ”A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer programs. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed ". The McKay paper did not go so far as to accuse Witzum and Rips of falsifying their experiment, instead it argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations. This fact, when combined with available wiggle room, was exploited by McKay et al. to duplicate the Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace.

Personally, I know not whether to believe it or not, although I do believe the bible may have some form of subliminal messages hidden within…although I am slightly skeptical whether the world will be ending so very soon…but with the way this meaningless war is going (being american) and interfering with other third world countries personal affairs is completely ubsurd, there is no reason why we should have to try and enforce our beliefs and the like onto others. With all these nuclear weapons…I do believe in a possible nuclear holocaust…but only time shall tell. We however as human beings can determine our own fates by making the right choices…but that would depend on we the people…making the right decisions and speaking out to help ourselves.

Clipping from a book: God gave noah the rainbow ign…no more water but fire next time.

Personally, I believe that this fake. Maybe I'm just cynical and bitter, and maybe that explains why I can't see colors or unicorns anymore, but these sort of things just confuse me. People are searching so hard, so desperately to find SOMETHING mystical about the bible, besides the lessons and myths it contains. The bible was not written by some all knowing future teller who leave little tiny messages alluding to (in the big big scheme of things) fairly insignificant events 2000 years later? That claim is just so beyond my scope of belief, I have a hard time not just breaking down and laughing. The bible was written by men, scribed by monks, and groomed and changed over the past two thousand years to what we know of it today.

I still wish I could see unicorns though.

As far as the world ending? The 2012 prediction is not even BASED off of the bible, but rather the end of the Myan calendar. The world was ALSO supposed to end on—

60 CE: Interpreting the Epistles of Paul of Tarsus literally, his writings seem to imply that Jesus would return and usher in a rapture during the lifetime of persons who were living in the middle of the 1st century.

2nd Century CE: Prophets and Prophetesses of the Montanist movement predicted that Jesus would return sometime during their lifetime and establish the New Jerusalem in the city of Pepuza in Asia Minor.

365 CE: A man by the name of Hilary of Poitiers, announced that the end would happen that year. It didn't.

375 to 400 CE: Saint Martin of Tours, a student of Hilary, was convinced that the end would happen sometime before 400 CE.

500 CE: This was the first year-with-a-nice-round-number-panic. The antipope Hippolytus and an earlier Christian academic Sextus Julius Africanus had predicted Armageddon at about this year.

968 CE: An eclipse was interpreted as a prelude to the end of the world by the army of the German emperor Otto III.

992: Good Friday coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation; this had long been believed to be the event that would bring forth the Antichrist, and thus the end-times events foretold in the book of Revelation. Records from Germany report that a new sun rose in the north and that as many as 3 suns and 3 moons were fighting.

1000-JAN-1: Many Christians in Europe had predicted the end of the world on this date. As the date approached, Christian armies waged war against some of the Pagan countries in Northern Europe. The motivation was to convert them all to Christianity, by force if necessary, before Christ returned in the year 1000. Meanwhile, some Christians had given their possessions to the Church in anticipation of the end. Fortunately, the level of education was so low that many citizens were unaware of the year. They did not know enough to be afraid. Otherwise, the panic might have been far worse than it was. Unfortunately, when Jesus did not appear, the church did not return the gifts. Serious criticism of the Church followed. The Church reacted by exterminating some heretics.

1000-MAY: The body of Charlemagne was disinterred on Pentecost. A legend had arisen that an emperor would rise from his sleep to fight the Antichrist.

1005-1006: A terrible famine throughout Europe was seen as a sign of the closeness of the end.

1033: Some believed this to be the 1000th anniversary of the death and resurrection of Jesus. His second coming was anticipated. Jesus' actual date of execution is unknown, but is believed to be in the range of 27 to 33 CE.

1147: Gerard of Poehlde decided that the millennium had actually started in 306 CE during Constantine's reign. Thus, the world end would happen in 1306 CE.1179: John of Toledo predicted the end of the world during 1186. This estimate was based on the alignment of many planets.

1205: Joachim of Fiore predicted in 1190 that the Antichrist was already in the world, and that King Richard of England would defeat him. The Millennium would then begin, sometime before 1205.

1284: Pope Innocent III computed this date by adding 666 years onto the date the Islam was founded.

1346 and later: The black plague spread across Europe, killing one third of the population. This was seen as the prelude to an immediate end of the world. Unfortunately, the Christians had previously killed a many of the cats, fearing that they might be familiars of Witches. The fewer the cats, the more the rats. It was the rat fleas that spread the black plague.

1496: This was approximately 1500 years after the birth of Jesus. Some mystics in the 15th century predicted that the millennium would begin during this year.

1524: Many astrologers predicted the imminent end of the world due to a world wide flood. They obviously had not read the Genesis story of the rainbow.

1533: Melchior Hoffman predicted that Jesus' return would happen in 1533 and that the New Jerusalem would be established in Strasbourg, Germany. He was arrested and died in a Strasbourg jail.

1669: The Old Believers in Russia believed that the end of the world would occur in this year. 20 thousand burned themselves to death from 1669 to 1690 to protect themselves from the Antichrist.

1689: Benjamin Keach, a 17th century Baptist, predicted the end of the world for this year.

1736: British theologian and mathematician William Whitson predicted a great flood similar to Noah's for OCT-13 of this year.

1792: This was the date of the end of the world calculated by some believers in the Shaker movement.

1794: Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, thought Doomsday would be in this year.

1830: Margaret McDonald, a Christian prophetess, predicted that Robert Owen would be the Antichrist. Owen helped found New Harmony, IN.

1843: Joseph Smith (1805-1844) was the founder of the Church of Christ, which became the Restorationist movement after many schisms. It now includes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – a.k.a. the Mormons, and about a hundred other denominations and sects. He predicted that the world would end in fire. This date received more rainfall in Utah than any other year until 1964.

Believe me, the list for these is HUGE! Check out the full site if you desire, it's an interesting read.

“According to this and that in the bible, Jesus is gonna rise in the flesh for us!! he'll walk along us again!”

first it was the year 1990 that he was gonna come back.. then 2000…. basically it's the same old thing: “Jesus/the Acycolse is gonna come any time! yes, yes I know I said it was gonna come in 1990, but that was just a mistake! really gonna come in 2000.. what? the year 2000 already passed? then it's gonna be on the year blah blah blah.”

And slightly off topic.. But the whole Unicorn being seen only by innocent virgins is an lie made up by Christians. you know how they like to assimilate all kinds of popular stories/myths and put an Christian spin on it. Originally, Unicorns were supposed to be seen just by anybody. didn't matter that you weren't an virgin, not innocent or whatever.the fact was.. you could look at them all you wanted but you couldn't really actually touch them if you were evil or had evil intents toward it, or else the touch would hurt, and make you feel like your hand was burned.

Basically, you just had to be a good person or at least semi-good to be able to touch one. But everyone can see an unicorn… that's until the Christians came along, decided that the only good person was an pure innocent person who never had sex, or otherwise you were an impure sinner!! so therefore, only innocent virgins could see unicorns according to them.

Just a interesting fact for you to know.

I'm on hitatus while I redo one of my webcomics. Be sure to check it out when I'n done! :)

1) In order to ACCEPT this code as real apocolyptic warning, you MUST accept the jewish/christian God as real… otherwise, who cares if some human put codes in to a book; what do they know? It's not divine… and the “end of the world” concept is divine in nature.

2) Jesus' key role was to fulfill the Old Testament which is why there is Christianity in the first place (the most important fulfillment was the death for and from our sins… but there's definitely alot more he fulfilled as well, like the reconstruction of the “temple” meaning “the church” ) . This code (which the NT was originally written in Greek) would have to present there as well. But… this point is negated if your are Jewish.

Which leads to…2b) If you ARE christian (which means you believe in the NT), then all this code is hog-wash. Jesus regarding the “end of times” when specifically asked by his followers:

Matthew 24Take heed, watch and pray for you do not know when the time is.

Acts 1And He said to them, 'It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.

Why then would the code be hidden in the text if it is NOT for us to know?

3) Also, you have to take in to account the a) highly stylized writing of the bible authors and b) the high degree of difficulty there is to translate ancient hebrew and greek as there are not literal translations for either the actual text/words and the stylized method in which the composed the “word of God”. That is why there are differing versions of the bible (amoung other reasons). So, even if you extract words from combining letters and code, those words too would have to be translated which, as I've mentioned, is difficult to precisely translate. So, even the code would be open and have differing translations.

4) Not to mention the human mind's copacity to solve & see code… that's why it's included in almost all standard IQ tests. In fact, when this code was first released, it was applied to the HEBREW translation War and Peace by Tolstoy and the ENGLISH translation of Moby Dick by Melville and they both yielded very similar results to the Bible.

5) Given enough time, you can find code anywhere. These bibles texts are massive. a) The same exact code used to “get” end of times results also yields many, many non-sensical, non-real words. b) given any large text and time, we can find a hidden code.

6) Finally, the Hebrew language has 22 letters and (pretty much) no vowels. Imagine how easy it'd be to get words out of a language that had no vowels. Sure, there's rules for word creation in Hebrew regarding putting together their letters, but it's significantly less difficult to string letters together than in english where certain words can only be formed by first placing a certain vowel combination. Hebrew is complex, but it'd be far easier to apply this code to hebrew text than to english.

This whole thing is just a creation of very intelligent and inuitive scholars. I guarentee I could find code all over DD given enough time.

These codes are really on for people who believe in God since as I've pointed out that accepting the code as real requires accepting God as real. And since they are for people who believe in God, it's silly to waste your time finding hidden code when there's so much explicitly talking about the meaning of our lives.

well, I think any sane christain would still believe in god and still NOT believe the code…

Just like how an crazy person could have doubts that god exists but believes in the code because the crazy person believes that the people who wrote the bible had mystical powers and could look into the future.

So I don't think people need to believe in god to believe that the code is real.

I'm on hitatus while I redo one of my webcomics. Be sure to check it out when I'n done! :)

Moby Dick was originally written in English, it doesn't need to be translated. Melville was American.

SomeoneAnd slightly off topic.. But the whole Unicorn being seen only by innocent virgins is an lie made up by Christians. you know how they like to assimilate all kinds of popular stories/myths and put an Christian spin on it.Originally, Unicorns were supposed to be seen just by anybody. didn't matter that you weren't an virgin, not innocent or whatever.the fact was.. you could look at them all you wanted but you couldn't really actually touch them if you were evil or had evil intents toward it, or else the touch would hurt, and make you feel like your hand was burned.

It's not Christians, its Romans. When Constantine decided to switch the official church of the Roman empire over from the old pagan God's to Christianity, imposed alot of the same holidays and mythological concepts that were part of the original pagan religion to make the transition occur more smoothly. Thats why you have these adulterated pagan myths “God helps those who help themselves” isnt christian, thats from a hercules fable. Christmas is just Saturnalia. I mean the Immaculate Conception occurs twenty something days before christmas. how much sense does that make?

Constantine was the worst thing to happen to Catholicism if you ask me.

kingofsnakeMoby Dick was originally written in English, it doesn't need to be translated. Melville was American.

Duh? Is “version” a better word?

I mentioned which translation was used because which translation is relevant since every code-related translation mentioned in the posts to the point I wrote that were in Hebrew… and certainly “Moby Dick” was translated to that language as well. Just like (as I also quoted in the same post) “War and Peace” WASN'T written originally in Hebrew… but the code WAS applied to the Hebrew version.

Aurora MoonJust like how an crazy person could have doubts that god exists but believes in the code because the crazy person believes that the people who wrote the bible had mystical powers and could look into the future.

So I don't think people need to believe in god to believe that the code is real.

That doesn't really make sense.

If you don't believe in God, then you don't believe the Bible to be the Word of God. And if you don't believe the Bible to be the Word of God, then any code - really present or not - is not an authentic warning of a real apocolypse in the non-believers mind.

At least, logically that's the case. Who knows with crazy people…

If it's not the Word of God in someone's mind… then why would they believe the code would be true? lol.

Furthermore, if these people DID have mystic powers and could look into the future, why would their mystic interpetation of Jesus' divinity be bunk, but their mystic interpetation of the apocolypse - a divine concept - be regarded as true?

According to this topic, I'm supposed to believe that there are “secret codes” in the Bible, that I'm supposed to believe in unicorns, and that I'm supposed to believe people actually use the asinine time descriptor “CE”?

According to this topic, I'm supposed to believe that there are “secret codes” in the Bible, that I'm supposed to believe in unicorns, and that I'm supposed to believe people actually use the asinine time descriptor “CE”?